Blind Spots Are Funny Things

A couple of posts by advice columnist Annie Lane that I would say fall under the umbrella of communicate clearly with your loved ones each reminded me of humorous interactions I have had with my wife and her family, and of why I regularly check a small list of advice columnists each week.

In the first of these, it would appear that an athlete has met his soulmate in the person of a couch potato, and asks, point-blank, Is it possible to build a lasting relationship when your passions and daily habits are so different, or is this a sign that we're not meant for each other?

Lane's answer is spot-on, although not something I ever needed to hear from someone else. My wife and I have always been open and clear with each other, and we each have tastes and pursuits not in common with the other that we're happy to see each other pursue, even as we find the other's choice baffling.

For example, my wife and her dad just love talking about real estate, and this interest extends to her looking at house listings as a kind of hobby. I enjoy looking at the events of the day from a philosophical perspective, and learned early in our relationship that she's apolitical and simply does not enjoy philosophical discussions. No big deal: I started a blog and have friends I can share that interest with.

Her interest in residential real estate became apparent to me later and over time, coming to a head in my bemusement some time around a move we had to make.

We've picked a place already. Why does she keep going on about this? I wondered, with a side of Oh God! I don't want to move again what is this? So I brought it up, learned that it was a kind of recreation for her, and was able to establish that I liked going into that only when necessary: "I find real estate about as interesting as you find philosophy." I told her.

Boundary established. She and her dad can be real estate buddies and I can leave the house talk to the bare minimum.

That communication issue was a non-issue for me. The one Annie Lane addressed in the second letter I found baffled me in the moment, but I solved it by accident.

In this post, someone is having trouble with wanting to establish different boundaries with her in-laws than her husband was used to. Her problem reminded me in part of an issue I had when my in-laws moved closer to us a few years ago:

There are also frequent "drop-ins." His parents live only 15 minutes away, and while I appreciate that they want to spend time together, there have been moments when they've shown up without calling first. I try to be gracious, but sometimes it feels like our home isn't fully our own. [bold added]

My case had the further complication that we each had keys to each others' homes to facilitate taking care of things when one family or the other was out of town.

I already was fumbling around for a polite way to ask my in-laws to give me notice before coming over for any reason when, one day, a trip by my father-in-law to return something took care of that for me.

I was at home alone mid-day, and nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw someone was in my house, that someone being my father-in-law.

"Please don't do that!" I blurted out spontaneously. "I nearly had a heart attack!"

Now, they always call ahead, and I feel silly for not having just asked in the first place.

The issue in the letter is a little bit different, but I like her answer, and it's in an area I'm a little "blind" in. I might have used similar advice were it not for that encounter, either by searching advice column archives or asking.

We can't always know our own blind spots, but it is possible to mitigate them by learning from the problems, big and small, that others face.

-- CAV

Florida Man vs. Right to Contract

Quick question: When is it proper for the government to tell a private employer whom he can hire, and how?

1. Any time that employer discriminates for or against anyone for reasons unrelated to fitness for the job as advertised, or
2. Never, because the purpose of government is to protect individual rights, including the right to contract.

Hint: Whatever other considerations an employer might have are moral matters, and an employer will bear the rewards or consequences (monetary or not) of those additional considerations.

The correct answer -- which apparently would come as a surprise to about 99% of today's government officials -- is 2.

The government has no business forcing employers to have hiring quotas or not to have them.

Florida is making the second mistake, in a knee-jerk reaction to decades of DEI/"corporate responsibility"/ESG:

The National Football League won't stop enforcing its "Rooney Rule" in the face of Florida's threats of possible legal action over the longstanding diversity hiring practice, league Commissioner Roger Goodell said Tuesday.

Speaking at the NFL's annual meeting in Phoenix, Goodell said the league will "engage" with Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who last week warned the Rooney Rule and other similar hiring policies are "illegal" under Florida's civil rights laws. But Goodell maintained the NFL believes its rule is "consistent" with state laws and will continue to be used to help "bring in the best talent."

The "Rooney Rule" is an effort by the NFL, a private employer, to help individuals who are not white males get into coaching jobs.

Whatever its moral status -- or anyone's opinion about whether it's necessary or the right way to give such candidates a fair hearing -- it's up to the owners of the NFL whom they hire and how they go about doing so. It would be wrong for the government to force them to have such a rule (if they didn't already) for the same reason it is attempting to force them not to do so now.

This is not the first time Florida's conservative Governor, Ron DeSantis, has shown that he's more of a fascist than a proponent of free markets. During the pandemic, he made exactly the same kind of mistake regarding vaccine "mandates" when he threatened cruise lines for asking their passengers to vaccinate before cruises (!):

[DeSantis] has no more right than the CDC to impose a vaccination policy on a cruise line. Do not be fooled by the fact that his position differs in concrete detail from the one favored by the left.

It is interesting to note that after decades of the left "mandating" things via improper government, many people seem to have forgotten the fundamental difference between a business owner setting policy and the government doing it for him.

-- CAV

One Snake-Oil Vendor Calls out Another

The editorial board of the New York Post does a yeoman's job of totting up the many king-like past transgressions of Democrat Presidents against the Republic, in the wake of the most recent protests against Donald Trump.

A sample:

Obama lost, often at the Supreme Court. That didn't stop him.

Nor did it stop President Joe Biden, who became infamous for ignoring Supreme Court decisions.

When the Supreme Court said that extending a COVID-era moratorium on evictions would be unconstitutional, Biden just did it anyway.

The same when the Supremes told Biden he lacked the power to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt.

Democrats didn't protest against Biden acting like a king. In fact, they encouraged him to go even further.

The protestors, whose demonstrations notably included anti-American chants and flew flags of hostile regimes, well deserved to be called out for their inconsistencies.

On top of that, Americans are fairly warned:

So when it comes to "no kings," Dems aren't just accusing Trump -- they're falsifying their own history.

The truth is that Democrats cheer authoritarian behavior -- as long as they're in charge.

Let them back into power, and they'll prove it once again.

It is too bad that that is essentially the whole message, which evades the similar damage Donald Trump does to our Republic every day.

When two men sell poisonous snake oil, the fact that one calls out the other does not mean his product is any better, and yet that is the gist of this editorial.

In better days, the writers would be well aware of and open about the similarity, and of the alternative of working to free our nation from any and all tyrants. They would exhort their side to do better. The Founders, many Christian, for example, were well aware of the tyranny of religious authority -- and yet they did not squabble among themselves as to which religion to make official. They deprived all religions of secular power instead.

Today, there is no such exhortation, but to not "let them back into power," at a time when universal suffrage is under blatant attack and the leader being protested against openly undermines the legitimacy of past elections while working to rig future ones. This is dangerously close to endorsing a dictatorship, as, surely, one would keep the President's political enemies out of power, as if they all deserve to be.

The solution to the problem of a too-powerful Presidency isn't to stick with the proverbial devil you know or to make that devil even more powerful, but to work to exorcise imperial power from the Presidency so neither "side" can abuse it.

-- CAV

Good News/Bad News From a General

The good news/bad news about Iran overall is, of course, that we have a President willing to fight it -- but who may be too impulsive and incompetent to prosecute it to the right conclusion: a complete decimation of Iran's ability to harm our interests.

That latter emphatically includes the end of its current regime.

The crisis caused by Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz epitomizes Trump's unfitness to lead this war, given that he plainly failed to account for that very possibility upon launching.

Fortunately, others have gamed out this scenario and, having done so, may yet save Trump's bacon. RealClear Politics summarizes an interview with a retired general on this point:

Retired Gen. Frank McKenzie, the former commander of U.S. Central Command, told CBS's "Face The Nation" that after years of preparation, after one month, the campaign against Iran is "further along than we would have expected to be at this point, in all the simulations that I've seen."

"This is not back-of-the-envelope calculations. These are things we've been working on for many years," he said. [bold added]

That's the good news. The bad follows in the very next paragraph:

"I believe that they will break. I believe that they will come to terms," he said. "I'll be honest with you. I've simulated this many years in many positions at Central Command; we're a little further along than we would have expected to be at this point in all the simulations that I've seen." [bold added]

In other words, for all our tactical superiority, we are crippled by an institutional strategic blindness to the nature of our opponent that feeds straight in to Trump's naive obsession with "making a deal" at all costs.

We fought World War II and prevailed in the Cold War against opponents that at least had a desire to live in this world. Those opponents were, in that respect, paragons of rationality compared to this foe. Unlike with them, there is no basis at all for negotiating with Iran's regime.

The current regime are religious fanatics for whom criminal bargains -- much less good faith negotiations for mutual benefit in the future -- are an alien concept, and who will lie through their teeth, if doing so will keep them in power, so they can regroup and try to kill us again another day.

-- CAV

Four Neat Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. I haven't had a library card in years, but I might get one after learning about two apps that use them for identification: Libby grants temporary, free (as in beer) access to ebooks and audiobooks, and Kanopy does the same for "classic cinema, indie film, and top documentaries."

2. Speaking of libraries, a German engineer would appear to have seen this hidden basement model railroad and raised it by 70,000 (!) books in his own hidden home library.

3. Every once in a while, I come across a list of highly-rated gadgets that I end up ratifying with my wallet. The latest is "65 Weird Things With Near-Perfect Reviews That Are Truly Life-Changing"

While I wouldn't exactly call any of these "life-changing," I like the car charger with the retractable cable, and I see two things my wife would appreciate, looking at it again.

One item I won't get, but which is neat are the "finger chopsticks" for snacking without getting dirty fingers.

I came up with the similar idea years ago of using plastic kiddie chopsticks for that very purpose, and told my kids to do that with Chee-tos and the like.

The item I see appears to require more effort than I'd like to completely free the hand of the chopstick.

4. Although I suspect that the kinds of jobs created by AI will mainly be of the non-obvious, things unseen type, not all of them will be -- or are.

You can go to Rentahuman right now and "get paid when agents need someone in the real world."

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Luddites!

-- CAV

A Nice Debunking

A while back, Suzanne Lucas debunked a claim by one Megan Cornish to the effect that changing her LinkedIn profile to male effectively quadrupled her page views.

I always like a good debunking, but I particularly enjoyed how thoroughly ridiculous she made Cornish's claim look in light of her methodology:

So, it's entirely possible that it's purely a coincidence that her views increased by 400 percent for this week, where LinkedIn thought she was a man.

But she did two other things:

1. Ran her posts through ChatGPT and asked it to change the style to be like a man would write.

2. Asked ChatGPT to make her posts more "agentic."

When trying to isolate a problem, you want to eliminate as many variables as possible to focus on the one thing. By doing three things, it's impossible to tell what the issue is here.

There are many possibilities.

It's the gender swap. LinkedIn denies that its algorithm looks at gender at all, but I've also had LinkedIn employees tell me that adding an external link will not affect views. As a prolific LinkedIn poster, I don't believe that last one for a minute. It's possible that the gender change made a big difference. [bold in original]

Lucas starts with the most charitable possibility first, but she's just being thorough.

It's also the signal for her readers to make some popcorn, because Lucas goes on to consider five other possible explanations Cornish failed to consider or left her results open to by being sloppy.

This was a fun read, and a good blueprint for anyone to remember any time someone makes a broad, fashionable claim like Cornish's.

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean "they" are out to get you. Or that they aren't.

-- CAV

Dumb Pitches Plan to Dumber

Donald Trump has pitched a 15-point peace plan to Iran through Pakistan.

Highlights of this plan reportedly include the following:

• A 30-day ceasefire.
• The dismantling of Iran's nuclear facilities in Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow.
• A permanent commitment from Iran to never develop nuclear weapons.
• The handover of Iran's stockpile of already enriched uranium to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and a commitment from Iran to allow the IAEA to monitor all elements of the country's remaining nuclear infrastructure. Iran must also no longer enrich uranium within the country.
• Limits on the range and number of Iran's missiles.
• Ending Iran's support for regional proxies.
• Ending Iranian strikes on regional energy facilities.
• Reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
• A removal of all sanctions imposed on Iran, alongside the ending of the UN mechanism that allows sanctions to be reimposed.
• The provision of US support for electricity generation at Iran's Bushehr civil nuclear plant.

Assuming the above is accurate and representative, I can summarize this in a question and two sentences:

• Have we learned anything since 1979?
• Every single item but one pertaining to what we'd like from Iran has already been tried, with Iran reneging at least once; and
• Reopening the Straight of Hormuz is the ace up Iran's sleeve it won't give up since it's the only card they have left.

Fortunately, we have the means to take that card by force.

Also fortunately, Iran's fanatic leadership would appear to be effectively even dumber than our President, who won't be able to make up for his lack of planning by simply declaring victory:

"Our first and last word has been the same from day one, and it will stay that way: Someone like us will never come to terms with someone like you," Lt. Col. Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesman for the headquarters, said in the video statement aired on state television. "Not now, not ever."

Good! The lemon of facing an intransigent, brutish foe might yet become the lemonade of a victory Trump is too dimwitted to pursue on his own initiative, even though winning is within reach.

-- CAV

P.S. Trump's long track record of breaking agreements may also be helping here, for a change. Some reports call the Iranian leadership "skeptical" and cite the earlier nuke site bombings during negotiations as the reason for this suspicion.